Dear Smiles: beyond open rates, more email answers

Fonts and dark mode were only half the mailbag. This time Smiles Davis gets into the questions that come after your email sends: what actually to trust in your reporting, how to test design changes without guessing, and why your boss's obsession with tight spacing might be working against them.

P.S. If you missed the first set of questions, you can find them here.

Dear Smiles: the open rate oracle

Are open rates still a reliable performance measure? What role should they play in reporting? — Questioning the Numbers

DEAR QUESTIONING: Open rates got a lot less trustworthy once Apple Mail Privacy Protection started pre-fetching images and inflating them artificially. They're still useful as a rough trend line (like, "did engagement move up or down after a change"), but they shouldn't be your headline metric anymore. Click rate and list health (unsubscribes, spam complaints) tell you a lot more about whether an email actually worked.

Dear Smiles: the blocked background blues

How do I handle background images getting blocked on certain email platforms — full image with alt text, or skip the image entirely? — Backed Into a Corner

DEAR BACKED INTO A CORNER: Never let your message live or die on an image loading. Treat the background image as garnish, not the meal and set a solid background color underneath it that's close to the image's dominant tone, so if the image gets blocked, the layout doesn't collapse into a wall of unreadable white-on-white text. If you do include content necessary for understanding the message in an image, then always write descriptive alt text, not just a repeat of your headline, so screen readers and images-off viewers still get the gist.

Dear Smiles: the dense data dilemma

We rely on custom HTML to show high-value properties and complex financial models. How do we apply design trends to dense data without breaking in rigid corporate email clients? — Drowning in Data Tables

DEAR DROWNING: Dense data and "trendy" design don't live in opposition — both need to employ the same basic design principles for them to work. Lean on consistent, well-sized typography (I'd recommend a minimum of 16px for legibility), adequate line height and plenty of negative space to do the heavy lifting, along with bolding key numbers for easy skimming.

Dear Smiles: the color trend conundrum

Colors do so much for emails — how do you chase color trends without straying from a brand palette? — Palette-Bound

DEAR PALETTE-BOUND: You don't need to abandon the palette, just remix it. How colors are used is more important than which colors, like using bold color-blocking, unexpected pairings, and gradient accents. Take your existing brand colors and push the ratios: more of your accent color than usual, a bold color-blocked hero section, a gradient built entirely from tones you already own.

Dear Smiles: the alt text agony

How does everyone actually write alt text? Is there a workflow, or do you just describe each image slice yourself? And when an image contains text, should alt text repeat that copy or summarize it? — Alt-ly Confused

DEAR ALT-LY CONFUSED: (Dear Smiles original, with a nod to a genuinely solid reader workflow shared in the same thread.) One reliable system: match the alt text to the image's job, not just its contents. Logo or generic brand image → the company/brand name. Icon → the feature or idea it represents. CTA button or event date baked into an image → that exact CTA or date, so nobody misses the ask. For images that contain a full paragraph of baked-in copy (which we wouldn't recommend anyway as you've seen in answers above), don't transcribe the whole thing, just summarize the core message in a sentence. Screen reader users want the point, not a wall of text. Comprehension is all that matters here.

Dear Smiles: the size standoff

Is the recommended 16–18px text size meant for desktop or mobile view? — Sized Up and Confused

DEAR SIZED UP: Think of 16–18px as your mobile floor more than a desktop rule. More and more email opens happen on phones now, and body text smaller than that gets squint-inducing fast. On desktop you've got more real estate to play with, so slightly smaller body copy can work — but if you only have the bandwidth to optimize for one screen, optimize for the smaller one. It's the harder audience to please.

Dear Smiles: the dark mode double-take

When designing for dark mode, how do you handle clients that alter your colors automatically? And is it worth going over every potentially black element to check, or is there a line where you stop? — Chasing Every Pixel

DEAR CHASING: Some clients (looking at you, certain Outlook and Gmail dark-mode implementations) will "helpfully" invert colors you never asked them to touch. The fix is to get explicit and set background and text colors directly in your code rather than leaving them to inference. As for where the line is — you don't need to audit literally every pixel. Focus your energy on your logo, your primary background, and any element where an unwanted invert would mess up the legibility. Perfectionism past that point has diminishing returns.

Dear Smiles: the content area color question

Is it best practice to have a background color on the content area? — Wondering About White Space

DEAR WONDERING: Not a hard rule either way, but a background color on your content area does a couple of nice things: it creates visual containment so the email reads as one deliberate block instead of text floating in a void, and it gives you a built-in dark-mode safety net (see one letter up) since you've already set an explicit color instead of relying on "blank equals white."

Dear Smiles: the text-only question

What level of importance do text-only emails still have — both for the human reader and for AI tools that summarize inboxes? — Plain and Simple

DEAR PLAIN AND SIMPLE: Text-only is quietly having a moment again, for two different reasons. For humans, a plain-text-style email can read as more personal and less "marketing," which sometimes earns more trust than a template with a lot of graphic elements. For AI summarizers, clean real text is just easier to parse accurately than text baked into images — so a text-forward email is more likely to get represented correctly if an AI assistant is the one skimming the inbox on someone's behalf.

Dear Smiles: the A/B testing ambition

What are the best design-based A/B tests — image placement, template changes, etc. — and what metrics should decide the winner? — Testing My Patience

DEAR TESTING: Start with high-impact, low-effort tests: hero image versus no hero image, single-column versus two-column layout, and button color or copy. Resist testing five things in one send — you won't know which change actually made a difference. As for the winning metric, I'd recommend matching it to your goal: click-through rate for engagement tests, conversion rate if the email's job is to drive a purchase or signup, etc.

Dear Smiles: the load time lament

Doesn't having many images slow down the email loading process? — Worried About Wait Times

DEAR WORRIED: It can, but "how many images" matters less than "how heavy are they." A handful of properly compressed images will often load faster than two or three bloated, uncompressed ones. Compress everything before upload, keep individual images under roughly 200KB, you'll be fine.

Dear Smiles: the bolding breakdown

How do you decide what to bold in body copy — whole sentences, or just key words? — Bold Move or Not?

DEAR BOLD MOVE: Key words and short phrases, almost always — the goal is to let a skimmer catch your main points without reading every line, and bolding entire sentences defeats that purpose by giving the eye nothing to rest on. Think of bold text as highlighter, not a second font: used sparingly, it draws the eye exactly where you want it; overused, it just makes the whole email look shouty.

Dear Smiles: the stubborn boss

My boss wants as little negative space as possible — no spacing between paragraphs, minimal margins — to keep emails "short." But they also keep asking me to make our designs "more modern." How do I reconcile these two asks? — Squeezed From Both Sides

DEAR SQUEEZED: This is the most relatable inbox drama I've read all week. Here's what you need: negative space isn't wasted space, it's what makes a layout read as modern in the first place and also just makes a layout readable. Short in length but overly dense doesn't make your email easier to comprehend, and comprehension is the point, or you get no action to follow.

You could reframe the conversation around word count, not spacing: you can absolutely tighten the copy to keep the email short, while still giving what remains room to breathe. Shorter words, taller whitespace — that's the modern look your boss is actually asking for, even if "less negative space" is the phrase they reached for.

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Expect Dear Smiles the week after our webinars each month! Maybe even more often if Smiles says it's okay.